Power of the Federation

Romulans are necessarily weak(in numbers not technology) given the apparent small size of the Romulan Empire.

Romulus is visible on the star map in Balance of Terror and apparently also on the floor picture of the Senate in Nemesis.

Logically space travel would tend radiate outward from central point yet Romulus is fairly close to Federation space and Vulcan particularly.

Its possible that a vast swath of terriority has never been explained which lies in the direction of the Delta quadrant, but if that is the case I don't know which route all those El Aurian refugees took fleeing the borg.

Throw in other variables like long lifespan and presumably low Vulcan like rates of fertility and you have hard limits on how much space Romulus could have settled.

Also the top of the line 24th century Warbirds ran quite a bit slower than Federation starships so I doubt the Empire grew at a faster rate than the overall Federation from the Earth-Romulan war until "The Neutral Zone".

Yet for some reason, the Romulans are definitely considered a threat by the Federation in TNG.

They feared going to war with the Romulans.

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Not really. In "The Defector" Admiral Haden speaking over subspace to Captain Picard regarding the Romulans.

"No one wants a war. But we are prepared to take them on."

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The sense I've gotten from various TNG episodes suggested the Federation worried about going to war with the Romulans. Especially the second and third seasons.

One is signing the treaty of Algeron to avoid further war;

PRESSMAN: That treaty has bound our hands and given the Romulans a tactical advantage for sixty years. I was
simply trying to level the playing field.

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Picard: "Is it a Romulan plot?" "Is it a ploy to start a war?"

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Quotes like that suggests that the Romulans were the super villains of TNG, besides the Borg.

Another example. the Cardassians were considered a minor power (depending on who you ask) but the same admiral later says: "the Federation is not prepared for a new sustained conflict" --with the Cardassians.

Sometimes I think how threatening an enemy is, depends on who's writing the script (and the series).

The Federation has the potential to be an unrivalled military juggernaught.

The fact they the seldom or never devote themselves to total warfare just speaks to the ideals to which the Federation adheres.

The Romulans are infact deadly adversies as any level of instellar war would result in the very least thousands of casaulties as was alluded to in the Defector.

The Federation even views the conflict with the Tamarians as a great tradegy though I am sure that race is incapable of threatening the Federation in any serious strategic way.

The Dominion was a joke. The female changling thought the shipyards of a bottled up Cardassia Prime would bleed the Federation dry?

Automated shipyards are not beyond Federation technology. Instead of one system those ships could be produced in hundreds simulateously. The ships don't even need to be crewed. Was the Dominion going to prevail against 30,000 Mirandas controlled by M5 or better AI?

Automated shipyards are not beyond Federation technology. Instead of one system those ships could be produced in hundreds simultaneously. The ships don't even need to be crewed. Was the Dominion going to prevail against 30,000 Mirandas controlled by M5 or better AI?

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Tell that to the morons who made Ds9 in the first place.
Have you seen the amount of technology that was dumbed down for the sake of drama?
Just how much they had to make the Federation 'underpowered' for the Dominion to be able to challenge them in the first place.

I'm hardly saying the Federation is 'all powerful' but we never saw its fullest technological prowess at play (in most cases, it was dumbed down), and the writers were too dumb to present it properly given the difficulty they had to even imagine such a world (even though OURS is relatively close to Trek in numerous respects when it comes to technology alone - numerous people in real life [writers included] aren't even aware of what our real technological potential was decades ago, let alone today).

Romulans are necessarily weak(in numbers not technology) given the apparent small size of the Romulan Empire.

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North Korea is puny. Yet it offers a deadly threat far exceeding that of larger and better equipped powers because it is extremely proximal to the most vulnerable parts of South Korea, and has made the necessary preparations for an attack that calls for no further buildup, troop movements or other warning signs.

Similarly, the Romulan Star Empire might be dangerous exactly because it is small, and therefore has its hard core of power bordering right on the Federation, rather than somewhere in the distant depths of a vast reign. And because it's an ancient but unyielding foe, this hard core happens to rest against what used to be the outer border of a very small initial Federation - that is, right against the UFP equivalent of Seoul.

The female changeling thought the shipyards of a bottled up Cardassia Prime would bleed the Federation dry?

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She appeared to be correct. The Dominion beachhead force had suffered strategic defeat after strategic defeat when it came to ship resources: yet another major shipyards destroyed basically every season, key reinforcements lost in the wormhole, further reinforcements cut off for good. And the force had started the fight with a fairly limited number of ships, a number that Starfleet had been able to count pretty exactly when it moved past them from the wormhole to Cardassia - and this initial force had been far from overwhelming, as we necessarily saw a lion's share of it deployed against DS9 in "Call to Arms" and it didn't amount to much. Despite all this, Dominion numerical superiority was the one quoted thing threatening to bring the Alpha Axis to its knees. Clearly, the beachhead force had truly astounding shipbuilding capabilities, amounting to a deadly superweapon comparable to the A-bomb in WWII (perhaps in the shipbuilding's favor).

Dominions shipbuilding capabilities lied predominantly in automation.
The Federation had this kind of technology for a long time - its not our problem the writers progressively made the Feds stupid as times went on and showed automation and proper use of advanced technology in only a fraction of things (which was mostly a reflection of our real-life abilities taken to practical level).
It was also mentioned that the Federation WAS able to match the Dominion in ship-building just barely.

However, we essentially got an impression that humanoids would be working as much as they do today - which was completely idiotic given the level of technology that WE have to automate just over 75% of jobs today, let alone the Federation which is supposed to be some 370 years ahead of us and doesn't use money at all.

The Dominion however had a distinct advantage in pumping out armies of clones.
Mind you, the Feds have the same capabilities (mostly), but they just don't opt to using them due to their ways of thinking (and the Feds aren't war oriented).

One little mishap that happened in the past would hardly stop the Feds from pursuing the technology (only in a bit more cautious capacity).
What we saw was basically: 1 issue that unfortunately resulted in deaths, and the whole project gets scrapped.
If anything the M5 computer was a viable project that should have been pursued even more after the accident, learning from it.
However, scifi writers also apparently have this insatiable and idiotic (not to mention groundless) desire to create ridiculous circumstances where technology is always somehow bound to 'turn against its creators' (which is utter stupidity).

One little mishap that happened in the past would hardly stop the Feds from pursuing the technology

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There might be deeply rooted moral objections, though. I mean, it makes no sense that neither Hitler nor Churchill used massive amounts of poison gas in the aerial bombing of civilian centers of population in WWII. The aim was to terrorize: poisoning would have been an excellent means, and might have been considered the most humane approach imaginable as it would have stood the best chance of shortening the war and minimizing casualties. But poison gas, while stockpiled, was never used that way. And biological weapons were held back in even more curious circumstances: the various long-shot ideas of the Japanese on turning the tide of the Pacific War would have benefited from a terror warhead, but none of the exotic delivery systems, real or projected (balloons, submarine-based aircraft, infiltrators in minisubs or boats), ever received this sort of payload, apparently even on paper.

If the great villains of mankind shirk away from potent weapons in times of desperation, we can hardly assume the Feds would calmly wield the possible futuristic equivalents just because humans are about to go extinct.

The inability to build starships to meet the demand, any demand, is built into the very structure of Trek drama. Otherwise how could Starfleet always be so starved of ships that the heroes arrive at or after the nick of time, when just adding a thousand ships would make the colonies safe?

They don't need sleep or food

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To be accurate, we don't really know that. We know the White keeps them going, possibly for days at an end, and we know they refuse to sleep or eat during a mission. But they do have digestive systems, and they do seek and consume food in "Hippocratic Oath".

You know, I just got done ranting in another thread about how I like for Trek to make sense, BUT, there IS a certain amount of handwaving, ala the old Marvel No-Prizes, that has to be done with some of this stuff.

Because really if you get down to it, with advanced AIs that are indistinguishable from living beings on the holodeck, and speed of light drives and weapons like phasers, any ship(s) to ship(s) battle would come down to who made the decision to engage in combat first, and then whose computers, weapons, and defenses were faster. The organics on board, especially if they weren't the aggressors, might only know that something happened because the computer reports that it did, or because they are captured or in a broken ship waiting to be captured, killed, rescued, or die when they run out of breathable atmo. The reason I say that is because while WE might not automate our systems to attack, some species out of all of those out there would, and then the rest would have no choice but to automate response systems, and maybe even to automate ATTACK systems triggered by sensor recognition of a hostile above a certain percentage of accuracy.

So, obviously there's some reason that isn't true that we haven't been told, and obviously there's a reason for some of the rest of this that we just haven't been told, too.

The inability to build starships to meet the demand, any demand, is built into the very structure of Trek drama. Otherwise how could Starfleet always be so starved of ships that the heroes arrive at or after the nick of time, when just adding a thousand ships would make the colonies safe?

They don't need sleep or food

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To be accurate, we don't really know that. We know the White keeps them going, possibly for days at an end, and we know they refuse to sleep or eat during a mission. But they do have digestive systems, and they do seek and consume food in "Hippocratic Oath".

Timo Saloniemi

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In "To The Death" Dax suggest to a Jem Hadar to get some sleep, and he replies they don't sleep, and don't eat either.

It's the White that's most likely responsible for it, but then again, they're also genetically engineered too (the sleep part).

I can easily see these guys as the ones building the ships really fast for the Dominion.

Seems like DS9 wanted to establish that the Federation couldn't keep up with the Dominion--for dramatic effect.

In that case you can see the difference with the Klingons ...they were fighting longer than anyone, and yet by the time of the Dominion war they still had enough fleets of ships to fight the Dominion.

I think the Klingons believed in stockpiling huge amounts of ships, so they were able to last through the Cardassian war, then the Federation war, then the pre Dominion war.